Ad Industry CEO Joins Kik as President of Services
Kik begins platform push with Los Angeles office
WATERLOO, Ontario, May 19, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Kik Interactive, the company behind the popular chat app Kik, has hired a top advertising industry executive to build experiences for brands and partners within the app.
Josh Jacobs joins the Waterloo, Ontario-based company after a four-year stint as global CEO of Accuen, a programmatic advertising agency owned by the Omnicom Media Group. Jacobs will build a Los Angeles-based presence for Kik, expanding the company's footprint beyond its established offices in Waterloo, New York City, and San Francisco.
Jacobs, who assumes the title president of Kik Services, is charged with cultivating a personal computing ecosystem within Kik by enlisting partners to build compelling chat-based experiences for the app's 200 million users. Kik already offers Promoted Chats and Kik Points, opt-in products that allow brands and developers to converse directly with users.
"Josh is that rare professional who gets both developers and advertisers," said Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik. "That's exactly the sort of skill set we need to build out an ecosystem of services around Kik."
Jacobs says Kik is perfectly poised to capitalize on the fast-growing opportunity for chat networks, perhaps the most important sector to emerge in consumer computing since social networking. Like Tencent's WeChat, which dominates personal computing in China, Kik offers consumers, brands, and developers the chance to interact in a one-to-one setting built around the most popular feature of the mobile phone: messaging. In WeChat, users can talk to their friends, share content, play games, buy goods, order fast food, and book taxis, among other things. Kik has previously said publicly that it wants to be the "WeChat of the West."
"Chat has emerged as the next great platform, not only for communications but also for building relationships," said Jacobs. "Kik's scale, open platform, and commitment to helping partners build chat-powered businesses has created an awesome canvas for innovation, open to everyone from developers to marketers."
Jacobs, a veteran of the ad-tech industry, has previously occupied executive roles at Glam Media and Yahoo, where he was vice-president and general manager for advertising technology platforms. His role at Kik starts immediately.
About Kik Interactive, Inc.
Kik Interactive, Inc. is the maker of Kik, a username-based smartphone messenger that lets more than 200 million people chat with their friends no matter where they meet. Using Kik's Promoted Chats, brands can engage chatters in one-to-one conversations at scale and measure the results using Kik's management dashboard. Kik is currently a Top 10 App on Google Play and a Top 30 App in the App Store, and continues to grow rapidly with more than 250,000 new users joining every day. Founded in 2009, Kik Interactive, Inc. is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and is funded by Foundation Capital, RRE, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and other leading venture capital firms. For more information, visit kik.com.
SOURCE Kik Interactive, Inc.
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